When I returned to the waking world, my whole body ached. Everything was too much – the light, the lo-fi music that was playing, the feeling of having a body – and a large part of me wanted to go back to sleep.

"Good morning. How are you feeling?"

I squinted towards the side of the bed – Looker sat there, looking disheveled and unshaven. The bags under his eyes suggested he hadn't slept in a while.

"Bad," I croaked.

He nodded. "Understandable."

I surveyed my surroundings – a sunny hospital room. I was hooked up to various monitors and an IV drip, wearing a hospital gown and a motley array of bandages. Prom was curled up next to me, fast asleep.

"What did I miss?" I said hoarsely.

Looker reached over and handed me a glass of water. "A fair bit, but things have calmed down now."

"How long have I been out?" I asked before gulping down half the glass.

"A few days. Your friends will be glad to hear you've woken up."

"I kinda wanna go back to sleep," I confessed.

Looker nodded. "Do what you need to do."

I drifted back away from this world that was too much, and into one of dreamless sleep.

The next time I awoke, I felt more alert. Through the window blinds, there was darkness. My brain felt like it could deal with the world. Prom was still snoozing by my side, and Coeur had joined him.

And Megan was dozing in a chair.

"Hey," I whispered.

She snapped awake. "Hey!" she whispered loudly. "You're awake! How're you doing?"

"I've been better." Now that I was awake for real, the aches of my body were more pointed and specific, but still dulled enough that I assumed I was on pain meds. "How are you?"

She laughed, but it sounded like a sob, and suddenly she was crying. I tried to push myself up to comfort her, but pain shot up my arm and I fell back down. Coeur and Prom stirred.

"Come here," I said, reaching toward her instead. She stood and embraced me as best she could, between the high hospital bed and the bulky blue cast on my right arm and the IV drip on the left.

Despite all the hours I'd been sleeping, I felt tired on what I can only describe as a cosmic level, and crying with my best friend came as a huge relief.

"Arceus, what a way to end a call," Megan said with a laugh as our tears subsided.

"Oh, Arceus, that must have been terrifying," I said, thinking of how it must have looked on her end. "What happened after? I just remember waking up… wherever that was."

"Well, first I panicked," Megan confessed. "But then I called Thomas."

I blinked. "You called–"

"I know," she said, grimacing. "I didn't have anyone else's number."

I remembered, months ago, Megan asking for his number. "Thank you for keeping her safe," she'd said.

"He's… he's around," Megan let me know, gesturing vaguely out the door. "I don't think he wants to come in unless you ask for him. But he's around."

I frowned, trying to parse that information. He was sticking around. But giving me control of the situation. Again: it would be much easier to hate him if he was less considerate.

"Okay," I said. "Mm… maybe not now. Who else is around?"

"Looker," she said. "Tricia managed to get here. Dawn, Lucas, your mom."

I blinked. "Mom's here," I repeated.

"Well, yeah, we couldn't not tell your mom. She's been super worried, can I go tell her you're awake?"

"Yeah."

Megan left the room. "You're okay!" Coeur piped up. She and Prom were wide awake by now.

"'Okay' is a strong word for what I am."

"We were so worried," said Prom. "We eventually came to, but we were all injured still, and we couldn't sense you with anything, between the psychic block and I guess aura can't travel across half the region–"

I pulled them in with my left arm. "Sorry to do that to you guys."

"Don't be silly–"

"Oh, yeah, cause WE'RE the ones who suffered–"

And I laughed, and we kept talking and catching up on how they'd been doing in the time I was out.

And then my mom came in, and I don't want to describe for you every single time I started crying with someone, except with Mom it was different because she'd never really… well, she had seen me get injured as a trainer before, back in Eterna, but never this bad. Not even close to this bad. And despite the tension between us lately… I don't know, man, she's my mom, it would take a lot more than an ongoing argument to make us stop loving each other.

"Arceus, if I knew being a trainer would be this dangerous…" My mom wiped her eyes with a tissue. "I don't think I could have let you go."

"It's not…" I sighed. "It's not supposed to be this dangerous. I've been doing something different."

"Do you have to?"

And her face was so desperate that despite all the crying I'd done in the last twenty minutes I almost straight-up burst into tears again.

"I've committed myself to this," I said. "I'm not gonna back down. I want to do this. But we're hoping it's almost over."

"How long have you been putting yourself in this much danger?" my mom said, reaching out and holding my face in a calloused hand.

"Longer than you think," I said tiredly.

"I'm largely to blame," said a voice from the doorway. Looker. "Evelyn has been working with me longer than the others."

Mom turned to me. "Who's this?"

"Agent Looker. From the IP."

Looker hesitated before saying, "At any rate, these kids have been a great help in, essentially, saving the world. I'm both deeply indebted to Evelyn and immensely guilty of all the harm that's come her way."

"I could've walked away," I pointed. "Still could."

He shook his head. "And I could stop asking for your help."

"I want to help, at this point," I insisted.

"Even after this?"

"Of course. If I stop now, they've won. They'll have beaten me, specifically."

Looker sighed. "She's a stubborn one," he said to my mom.

"You're telling me."

Looker laughed. To me, he said, "I have updates for you eventually, but for now, your friends have been worried about you, and you need some time to recover."

"Okay, but you will give me those updates and keep me involved, yes?"

Looker gave a huff. "I will, if only because you'll hunt me down if I don't."

"Good," I said happily.

Shaking his head (but not concealing his smile), Looker left the room. Mom looked at me. "You really are committed to this, huh?"

"I mean, how often do you get the chance to save the world? It's kind of the coolest thing I've ever been a part of."

Mom nodded. "Well. As much as I want to keep you safe, I don't want to get in your way, either. You're on a journey in more ways than one. Can you promise me you'll to do your best to stay safe, though?"

I laughed to myself. I'd lost count of how many times someone who cared about me had asked that.

"My best is all I can do."

Tricia came to see me – honestly, the fact that she'd managed to persuade her parents to let her take a trip out here meant a lot. She'd brought board games with her, and she and Megan helped me pass the time as I healed.

The doctors updated me at some point on the laundry list of injuries I only vaguely remembered sustaining – aside from the broken arm, there were burns, bruises, claw wounds, fingernails missing on one hand, broken fingers. I was secretly hoping some of the gashes would turn into cool scars. They were still monitoring me in case I showed further signs of internal electrical burns or nerve damage.

A chansey came in with a nurse a few times a day for internal healing and to preempt some of the nerve damage. Def also got to help, and he was learning quickly and eagerly. He hadn't gotten to really work on healing someone like this before.

My other pokemon were all fine – they just hadn't gotten healed by the time I called Megan. And they didn't get healed for a while, either, until Looker came and found them in the back of the Sunyshore Pokemon Center. My pokemon had all been incredibly stressed out – even Hope wouldn't stop fluttering around me, twittering anxiously. They'd been keeping me company in shifts, but now that I was awake, they started piling into the room at night. I let as many of them onto the bed as physically possible, although at some point the nurses took pity and brought extra blankets and pillows to spread out on the floor.

We were in Jubilife, by the way. Dawn and Lucas and my other rescuer had apparently found me in an underground bunker deep in the forest west of Pastoria. It seemed incredibly improbable that I'd been rescued at all.

Dawn and Lucas came to check in periodically – Lucas sort of awkwardly stood in the doorway, but Dawn came in and sat next to the bed and we chatted for a bit. I did my best not to ask for the updates I was itching for.

Looker came by a few days later to give those updates.

"The most pressing information is that Galactic has the Lake Trio," he began.

My jaw dropped. "What?!"

"Right around the time you went missing. The bomb dropped at Lake Valor around noon. I managed to gather Dawn and Lucas and sent them ahead to the lake while I kept looking for you. Then Thomas called me and told me what happened."

"And you stopped fighting." The other (maybe truer) reason Galactic had wanted a hostage.

"We backed off. And don't you dare blame yourself – I doubt you blamed Dawn when we didn't retrieve the Orbs at Snowpoint Temple, so you aren't allowed to blame yourself for this."

I had, in fact, been just about to blame myself, but he made a fair point. "Then what?"

"We reconvened at the Valor Lakefront. I'd sent my natu to pick up Thomas."

"Megan said she called him."

"Right. He was still in Snowpoint. Apparently Megan wasn't the only reason he knew something was wrong, though – he said he suddenly had a terrible feeling of fear pulling him towards us."

"Mesprit? But why was that useful?" Hey Thomas, everything's going to shit, lemme help you feel bad about it?

"As it turned out, the emotions led him to you."

"Huh?"

"He… he was somewhat incoherent – I don't think the emotions were any small thing – but he said fear, and guilt, and sadness were all guiding him. We picked up your pokemon from Sunyshore and then moved as fast as we could to south-central Sinnoh, but at some point the woods west of Pastoria grew too thick to teleport through, and we had to proceed on foot. It was hours before we found a psychic block in the woods. The three of them fought their way in, got you out, and teleported to Jubilife."

"Why Jubilife?"

"It's densely populated and far enough from Galactic's various headquarters."

"You haven't felt anything different, have you?"

Looker appeared confused. "No? In what way?"

"Like – the Lake Trio."

"Oh, because they've been taken? No, nothing. I don't think their physical forms have much to do with the bulk of their abilities."

That made sense – Azelf had helped me significantly, and I think Uxie a bit as well, and Mesprit had guided Thomas, and all of that was after they'd already been caught.

"Well… now what? They pulled the location of Spear Pillar out of me. And your name — or, code name. And that I time traveled."

"The good news is that they still don't have the Spear Key, although it's the last thing keeping them from Spear Pillar. But our options at this point are either to attack their headquarters or cut them off at Spear Pillar. Either way will require preparation."

I nodded. "And we'll have to do it on the down-low so that the IP thinks you've stopped asking us for help."

Looker was silent for too long.

"Looker?" I said warily.

He took a moment, but then he met my eyes. "I quit," he said.

"You WHAT?"

"I officially resigned from the International Police."

"What?! Why?!"

Looker hesitated. "When you went missing," he began slowly, "I received a call from HQ. They asked why Maylene and Crasher Wake were leading a rescue mission at Lake Valor, rather than myself leading a fight. I informed them that Galactic had taken you hostage and we had redirected our efforts towards finding you. They insisted we return and fight Galactic, because 'individual losses are inherent to the field.' I resigned and hung up on them."

I was speechless.

"And I don't regret it, either."

I still didn't… There were too many implications of what this meant — too many consequences and emotions and holy shit–

"You quit? Just like that?" I blurted out.

"It's like you said: my career has been getting in the way of my job," said Looker. "I'm tired of it."

He'd been tired of it before, though. I was both touched and guilty over my role in him quitting the career he'd committed his life to. But I guess it was still his decision.

"So… how's that change things?"

"My resources are obviously more limited than they had been. I'm permanently down to the one natu that's mine. But overall this opens things up for us significantly."

"You can save the world without going through miles of red tape."

"Exactly."

I nodded. Then I cackled.

"I can't believe you've gone rogue! You're, like, the most lawful person I know."

"I've broken rules before," Looker said, sounding offended.

"That's true. Increasingly so."

We talked for a while longer, catching up on general updates and Galactic status updates and how my gym battle had gone, a solid week ago, and when he got up to leave I said, "Looker?"

"Hm?"

"Is he out there?"

Looker knew who I meant. "He is."

I remembered, eons ago, the words "Isn't it normal to worry about someone you carried to the hospital?"

"Can you tell him… I'm ready to talk."

Looker nodded. "Will do," he said gently.

He left the room. I waited. I heard voices in the lobby.

And soon enough, Thomas appeared timidly in the doorway. "Hi," he said quietly.

"Hi," I said. "Let's chat."